Ukraine: Follow The Energy

Scrape away the media sensationalism and geopolitical posturing and it boils down to a simple dynamic: follow the energy.

Though many seem to believe that internal politics and geopolitical posturing in Ukraine are definitive dynamics, I tend to think the one that really counts is energy: not only who has it and who needs it, but where the consumers can get it from.

Let's cut to the chase and declare a partition along long-standing linguistic and loyalty lines a done deal. Let's also dispense with any notions that either side can impose a military solution in the other's territory.

RE: Russian Army. Effective draft evasion is running 80%. Morale is low, training is very poor and poorly funded. The Russian army has also gone through 22 years of near continuous contraction.

And this standing army has heavy commitments in the Caucasus and Far East Siberia. Moreover, at least half of these Russian ground troops are short term 12 month conscripts. I don't think these kids will produce many usable and motivated troops. The low morale recently seen in the Ukrainian Berkut and other police will be multiplied by at least 10x.

Russian speaking Ukrainian bands are rumored to already be crossing the borders into Russia territory. They're to be ready to sabotage bridges and infrastructure and generally retaliate. Fluent Russian speakers with many years experience of living in Russia. Who can say for sure if this has already happened or is just being threatened? We can say this is a very real danger. These people look just like "Russians."

And we can also say this threat will seriously complicate Russian rear area security and logistics. And speaking of logistics, the distances in south Ossetia and Abkhazia were very short and the populations were entirely friendly. Neither condition prevails in the Ukraine outside the Crimea.

Supplying moving armored units over hundreds of miles of occupied country is very difficult logistically. The logistics for air assault helicopter units are just as bad. These helo units look mobile but they're a lot like a yoyo being twirled around your head on the string. They only go fast within a fixed radius anchored by logistics that are about as heavy to move as an armored division's supply columns. That is years in the 101st Airborne Division talking. The fuel consumption rates are immense. Stuff starts breaking down fast.

Conclusion: a de facto partition is already baked in because neither side can force a re-unification. Various jockeying and posturing will undoubtedly continue for some time, but the basic end-game is already visible: de facto partition.

Let's move on to correspondent A.C.'s observations about energy.

This map rounds out the European energy Rosetta Stone. When they hear that Italian fighter jets are over Tripoli, or that the French Foreign Legion has returned to the deep Sahara Desert, they can can better understand the reasons and real objectives of such operations.

Many have noted that the Russia economy is critically dependent on oil and gas exports to the EU. It should be noted that the converse is less true every day about EU dependence on Russian oil and gas. The Wall Street Journal even had a line about an EU proposal to push natural gas EAST to the Ukraine. It's hard to understand that passage or where the natural gas could come from unless one understands the North Africa to southern Europe gas pipelines.

The factors bringing the conflict in Ukraine to a head are:

1. The natural gas discoveries in eastern Poland and western Ukraine played the largest role.

2. The reduced importance of the gas pipeline running through the Ukraine to Europe as compared to 2009. Since that time the Nordstream lines have been finished and Gazprom acquired commercial control of the Belarus pipeline. The South Stream lines are well along in development.

Events in Libya, Mali and Algeria are not hermetically isolated from this. They are part of a comprehensive energy policy problem being dealt with by the same leaderships. It increasingly looks like a series of peripheral Energy Wars that are being fought out for control of Europe.

LNG exports are going to become a weapon in the struggle for geopolitical influence and control.

This highlights another problem for Russia/Gazprom. Its present natural gas advantage in Europe now rests mainly on its pipeline infrastructure. This advantage is fading due to the current and proposed pipeline projects running through Turkey to Europe, plus LPG terminal & ship developments, plus the five trans-Mediterranean pipelines from Libya, Algeria and Morocco to southern Europe, plus local shale gas plays...

The Ukraine is not the only country becoming less systemically important to Europe for natural gas supply. So is Russia. Current events will only accelerate everyone's efforts to diversify away from such an unstable and apparently dangerous supplier.

I think the long-term fallout from the Ukrainian Crisis will be similar to China's attempt to exploit its temporary low price monopoly position in rare earth metals a few years ago. The result is rare earth metals are becoming less rare by the day as alternate mines outside China are opened and reopened.

Thank you, A.C. Scrape away the media sensationalism and geopolitical posturing and it boils down to a simple dynamic: follow the energy.

I posted - repeatedly - there isn't going to be a hot war. MAD is still around, and doing its job.

Frankly, I wondered why anyone would oppose anyone else having the bomb. After all, it's highly effective at stopping war.

Then it dawned on me: The reason is because then the US, China, Russia, et. al couldn't go in and drone countries, or loot counties, or finance a coup in countries that have the bomb. They’d have to actually use win-win scenarios to advance their agendas.

Can't have that, can we? How can you rape the world if everyone is carrying a gun to kill the attacker?

The more I read ZHer posts - well, some excluded of course but most posts - the more I realize how long I bought the Big Lie of the oligarchs and their wage slaves carrying out their policies.

George Wallace once said of the Dems and Reps, "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum."

How true.

And how true of all the Controllers no matter where you are in the world.

So I say, "People of Ukraine, you have thrown off the chains of one group of oligarchs to have them replaced with the chains of another group of oligarchs. Either way, you are nothing but slaves."

And to think of all the innocent lives the oligarchs are guilty of murdering for wealth.

The French Revolutionaries only killed half the guilty parties - and replaced them with the other blood-thirsty half that survived.

In the Big Scheme of things, nothing changed.

And nothing ever does.

Or to put this in the form of a Robert Crumb cartoon:

Average Joe is climbing the mountain to seek the wisdom of Mr. Natural.

He reaches the top, and exhausted, he asks, "Mr. Natural! Mr. Natural!! What's it all mean??"

Mr. Natural, in his finest guru attire looks down at him and says, "Don't mean shit."

Russia at minimum needs Crimea and Odessa to control Kiev because these are the only two ports, otherwise everything has to come overland through other countries and makes things more expensive. Odessa also links up to Transniester the breakaway part of Moldova which is made up of mostly Russians and has been isolated all this time. Odessa in Russian hands gives Transniester umbilical cord to the sea and to Mother Russia. I think the referendums will have Odessa go to independence from Kiev and join up with Russia. We will see the same in the industrial East referendums. Then Kiev can do nothing as Russian troops come in to regions that are ethnically Russian and want to be part of Russia. Putin has made it clear that he will not allow Ukraine troops to fire on Russian citizens which is what will happen if Ukraine sends troops into the areas that want to break away.

Byzantine Catholics would like their Basilica in Constantinople back too - held it for almost a 1000 years until being slaughtered by the Jannisaries in 1453 - how far back do you want to take this line of reasoning?

Well seeing how there are 1.6 million ethnic Russians in Crimea I would say they have more than enough boots on the ground to hold on to Crimea, as for Odessa its a port city and the Russians rule the Black Sea, not to mention the Region is Pro Russian and dont forget Transniester is already heavily militarized and weaponized by Russian speaking population. If the Ukraine military, which is practically nonexistand, all this media talk of Ukraine military and I see nobody, while I see tons of Russian equipment and troops, so if Ukraine military moves on Odessa they will be flanked fromt he west and North by Transniester, basically they would be walking into a pincer formation. Look at the map.

Well Mars, I wish you were correct... And I am more than willing to be wrong about this, but I strongly suspect I am not.

No one builds a military and then doesn't use it. Nations throughout the world are rearming... With the exception of US... one could speculate a number of reasons for that...

There has been no weapon designed by man that has not eventually been used. Near the end of WW II US built three nuclear bombs... they tested one and dropped the other two.

Currency war being fought world wide... will end in agreement or war... My money is on the latter.

US empire is crumbling... this is another prelude to war... ie WW II British empire was following apart. In fact, Hitler use to offer countries a portion of the British empire to come into the war (Stalin use to write to Hitler asking what part of the British empire he was going to get... Hitler answered him in June of '41)

I could go on... world is facing perfect storm... suspect it is going to get very wet...

Ad-Block Edge (not Plus) is better in Firefox. Make sure you add the subscriptions to filter out malware and social networking sites - it makes things a LOT better. Ghostery is a decent add on as well for filtering out more crap, but it reports your browsing habits for "marketing research", so it's got a bad side.

I had the same problems with explorer, and it was only with the hedge that I experienced it. Other sites were fine. Not saying who or why but I got it cleared up by running anti spyware software. I got that Super spyware free down load and all is better.

Just use mozzilla and use adblock+, and then get all the addon's that say 'google block', you will end up using about 5 tools, but you need to have them all installed, and make sure you always have shockwave turned off its the worst NSA trojan horse.

Note that to view Banzai's pictures they'll no longer be visible, because he's not showing JPG's, which can be done by a dumb browser, but he's using a google tool that requires all the dumb ad stuff be on, so its clear that banzai's photos are all a honey pot to get people to enable ad's,

The problem is if you enable ad's then you have 1,000's of dumb clients spying on your computer.

turn it all off, and you'll be fine, and if Banzai wants people to see his work, then he can post JPG's like normal non-nazi human beings

The EU is trying to wean itself of Russian supplies... They can't, but that won't stop them from trying...

The "discoveries" in Poland and the Western Ukraine are shale plays that have yet to be demonstrated. Exxon walked away from Poland in 2012 but this may be have been related to presssure over Sakhalin...

If you are the world leader of a country and you have a picture of yourself shaking the hand of a smiling western politician know that you are somewhere on the list of people to be thrown under the bus and that was your handshake of death

The moment Mubarak showed he could not keep things under control, he was dropped. Morsi showed he could not run the country. In fact no one can. Egypt is being propped up by Gulf money....

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Is that not what anyone reasonable wants? Let the guys who have to rely on violence to fail?

It is simple, the guys that can't keep the peace don't last. And it is all about keeping the peace now, there are tremendous forces driving things, rising food prices, stagnant growth, lack of oppurtunity....

And there is no fix in the offing, it is about managing the overshoot...

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Assad is a very different story. Perhaps later...

Yanukovych is another failed player, it all it takes is $5 billion over 23 years to topple the Crown Jewel of the FSU then someone is not doing their job... Very simple....

What happened in Libya was a Total and BP production agreement expiration, and Gadaffi said he was going to replace them with Petrochina and PetroBras.

Total and BP pushed their governments into the old human rights rage (with nothing having changed there) amid the initial Tunisia upheaval.

Then the UN was persuaded to provide a resolution that authorized "protecting civilians", and both China and Russia agreed to it. After several months of $120 Brent, the sortie total flying from Italy started to eat into the fuel supply budget of NATO and suddenly "protecting civilians" transmuted into "bombing purely defensive Gadaffi force positions". Russia and China were angered and essentially said they would never again cooperate with any UN resolution.

I was quite taken by the actually excellent press conference transcript from Putin today in that he used the phrase "protecting civilians" several times, and noted pointedly how activity in Libya had been so very corrupted.

And Khadafi could not push them out either... This is RealPolitik, if you cannot back your claim, you have no claim...

Incidentally, Russia and China got fooled at the UN? Is that what you are telling me? You know, the Chess Player and the Dragon?

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Edit: BTW, thanks for the lead, I looked up the Chinese and Russian involvement, I had forgotten about that... They would have gotten some western built infrastructure pretty cheaply if Khadafi had been able to keep his word... Everyone tries to play the game....